On 20/04/07, John Moorhouse <john.moorhouse(a)3jays.me.uk> wrote:
We are using an implementation of mediawiki to provide
policy and
procedure documentation to staff, it is a 'half open wiki' in that we
are using the 'stableversions' extension to mark a version of each page
as 'appoved' which is the default shown to staff if they are not logged
in, whilst still allowing them to make changes / updates to the next
version if they are log in.
This works fine internally but we have been asked to look at using an
externally facing wiki to host a set of policy & procedures that will be
shared by a number of statuary organisations, the only real problem with
this is that anything that we make visible externally needs to in both
English and Welsh.
All of our editors would be working in english, so we would develop and
approve in English and then translate to welsh.
Has anyone any recommendations on how we could achieve this particularly
with a need to know when pages have been changed and so require
re-translating.
Interesting. AFAIK MediaWiki doesn't have any kind of translation
management support, but it could certainly be useful for the future.
It sounds like you have the case that the English documents are the
"master documents", and the Welsh are just translations, so the Welsh
are not being actively developed, just updated to reflect the English
ones. That probably makes it a bit easier.
Some elements of wiki editing will make life a bit easier for your
translators. You can use page revision IDs, of the English pages, to
make clear how up to date the translations are.
Under the toolbox each page has a link "Permanent link". It will add
something to the URL like "&oldid=69899". that is the revision ID of
the current version of the page, so if you give people that URL, even
if it gets changed in the future, the link will still take them to
that particular version.
Also page diffs should be helpful for your translators, to see what has changed.
eg. you could put a template on the top of all the translated pages,
{{translation|69899}}
-->
"This page is a translation of the [[englishpage&oldid=69899|original
English document at revision 69899]]. If the English page has been
updated since that revision, this document may not reflect the updated
text."
then when your translators work on the translated pages, they should
change the revision ID in the template (and also put something in the
edit summary I would guess).
But this doesn't give you a way to see which translations are out of date. hm...
You could train the people editing the English pages, to add
[[Category:Pages requiring translation updates]] to the page every
single time they make a significant edit. Then when translators want
to translate, they can go pick a page in that category and update it,
then edit the English page and remove the category. That's kind of
cumbersome.
Just some ideas.
cheers,
Brianna